Making A New Deal

Lizabeth Cohen wants to prove that Chicago workers created a working class during the depths of the Great Depression. Unfortunately, the means she chooses to prove her case do not completely convince me. In Cohen’s hefty Making a New Deal she posits a transition of Chicagoans from ethnic, employer-loyal workers in 1920s to members of a common culture who articulated a class consciousness in the 1930s. She asserts that workers needed to overcome ethnicity before they could realize class, but then backs away from this claim. In the end, Cohen’s ambivalence, the rosy picture she paints of the New Deal era, and her overemphasis of class consciousness all weaken the book.

The book’s central theme holds that ethnicity had to be overcome if working-class unity was to be attained. Cohen plants seeds of theoretical discontent within this framework that undermine her basic argument. For instance, in Chapter 3, “Encountering Mass Culture,” Cohen argues that mass culture and consumption standardized American life in the 1920s. But then she retreats from this sweeping generalization, equivocating that “the impact of mass culture depended on the social and economic contexts in which it developed and the manner in which it was experienced” (1

. . .

View the whole essay, without interruption

Thompson and his vision of the realization of class consciousness.

The other causes of the development of a working class in Chicago lead to another less-than-convincing theory. If we believe Cohen, life during the Depression was not that bad. The ideological unity and institutional conformity achieved by the workers as presented in this book happened too effortlessly in what was one of the most turbulent, disorienting periods of American history. Where did they turn? To the government of course, through their newfound sense of trans-ethnic unity. She also depicts the welfare capitalism of industry owners and managers as the means by which capital overcame worker radicalism and satisfied employee demands and desires. Yet these structures collapsed during the Great Depression, thus opening the door for new social support networks. Either ethnicity or class has to prevail here, and I am not sure Cohen knows which one she prefers. Working-class life appears just a bit too happy and the creation of the New Deal a little to easy for this reader. My guess is that Cohen’s title is a play on Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Once ethnicity was overcome and a “common culture” was articulated, the possibilities for unity were endless.

What is missing from this book is struggle— whether violent or passive workers’ attempts to retain their workplace rights and ethnic culture.

Cohen seems to be engaging some historiographical giants in her book. Otherwise, they were not the major cause of working-class formation and unity.

Approximate Word count = 1060
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Simply subscribe to view this paper, and 100,000 others.